"Burning the Old Year"

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.



From "Words Under the Words: Selected Poems", published in 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952)


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As I wandered through the woods near home today, I came across the remains of a bonfire in a small clearing. All I could make out on one half-burnt piece of paper was the incomplete sentence "The study of Religio..... .....because - " The only other partially intact remnants are pictured here amongst the ash and charred twigs. A little scrap of someone else's life. How tantalising. As I crouched on the ground, I thought I could hear raindrops. But it was the sound of leaves falling gently through the canopy of the trees high above. Autumn is coming, and very soon I will finally be old enough to make an important choice in my own life.